Events like webinars and conferences help companies relate to their users on a far more personal level, establish their voice within an industry, and ultimately can drive user numbers and sales. For this reason, events play an important role in any business.
Though nothing can truly replace face to face interactions, the process that occurs before and after an event is just as important as the event itself when aiming for a high ROI. That means ticketing and follow-ups need to be executed in an efficient and purposeful manner. Of course, the event itself can be expensive and require copious amounts of planning – in order to nail the event you’re going to need help with the event follow up operations. So what’s the secret to a seamless and effective business event? Automation.
Here are 6 steps to automate your event planning and follow up:
1. Choose An Event Ticketing Platform
There are many ways to ticket your event and one of the easiest is a platform like Eventbrite. Not only does it act as a hub for your event, allowing people to purchase tickets from a central, user-friendly place, but it also allows you to take advantage of the large user base when it comes to promoting your events. Having a platform to handle ticket sales and customer information gathering will make your event much more efficient.
2. Ensure No Financial Surprises
Though your ticketing platform will process payment for you, syncing your earnings with your Accounting app is a key step in making your event management a breeze. Not only does automating this process give you more time to focus on your marketing follow up and eliminate the need to transfer the same data from Eventbrite to your Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Marketing AND accounting apps, but it also unlocks important data insights. When your earnings and your accounting apps are perfectly synced, you can see what your profit margin was instantly and easily understand where each and every dollar was spent and earned.
You can connect Eventbrite to your accounting app using a Workato integration recipe. Workato is the most powerful connector for Eventbrite on the market. Simply create an account, click Install, and log in to your Eventbrite and accounting app profiles:
- Get This Recipe: Order in Eventbrite creates invoice & payment in Quickbooks
- Get This Recipe: Order in Eventbrite creates invoice & payment in Xero
- Get This Recipe: Order from Eventbrite creates Journal Entry in Intacct
3. Set Up Automatic Follow Ups
Events are an imperative part of marketing to customers and donors, providing you with valuable face to face interactions. However, once the event is over it can be challenging to keep track of the contacts and leads that you gathered for effective and targeted follow-ups. You put in so much work to pull off an amazing event you don’t want to fall for an event hangover. Make sure that valuable attendee information is successfully transferred in a targeted manner to your CRM and marketing apps after the event.
Integration between your event management software, your CRM, your marketing automation, and your email marketing will cut down on the time you spend manually entering attendee names and emails into different databases, so you have more time creating and executing an effective follow-up plan. This ensures you can achieve the full ROI potential of your event and never forget to follow up with an attendee again.
4. Automate Social Sharing
With all the chaos of event planning, sharing how the event went after to drive the highest ROI can slip through the cracks. Google Apps and Social Media are two of the most important and frequently used tools for event planning and management. You can use Workato to get the most out of each tool and save yourself hours by automating some simple processes. Here are some scenarios where automation is a life-saver:
5. Sync Your Other Apps To Ensure a Full Picture of Your Customer/Donor
For both Nonprofit and Business Professional Events, the goal is usually to market to customers and donors so that they develop higher brand loyalty and give more donations; however, an event is only one touch point on the marketing pipeline. There are several touch points that might precede or follow the event including email marketing campaigns, webinars, surveys, or online fundraisers. If the marketing pipeline is completed with automation, you can easily track the customer journey from prospect to donor/customer to an active donor/repeat customer.
For this reason, make sure you integrate Eventbrite with any other business apps you use to create a full picture. This full picture of a customer is instrumental in cultivating the correct interactions for each individual and ensuring more successful marketing campaigns.
Start automating your events by visiting the Eventbrite App Directory >
